Robot and Fox: The Amazing Journey children’s book #kickstarter

Robot and Fox is the story of Roland and his epic journey with his buddy, Fox, as they search to find Roland’s ship and get him home.

Robot and Fox: The Amazing Journeyis a children’s book about a robot named Roland Botemus and his journey across the galaxy to find the perfect gift for his fiancée, Rosie. But, when Roland accidentally becomes separated from his ship on a distant planet, his mission plans change, and instead, he must scour the planet to find his ship and return home. Luckily for him, one of the planet’s furry inhabitants is ready and rarin’ to help!

Meanwhile, Rosie receives a distress signal from Roland’s lost ship. When she tries to contact Roland and doesn’t get a response, she decides to venture across the galaxy and rescue the one she loves. Little does she know, she’s going to have to face her own set of perils as she encounters dangerous space anomalies and cunning, crazy pirates!

Robot and Fox: The Amazing Journey Book Cover

My goal is to release Robot and Fox: The Amazing Journey as an eBook and online. As a first-time self-publisher, this is the best way for me to make the book widely available for everyone to read quickly and inexpensively.

Robot and Fox will be available for purchase online to read on your tablet, e-reader, phone, or computer!

The world ofRobot and Fox is full of robots, snow whompuses, pirates and more! Click the picture of the whole crew below to find out more about all the characters Roland and Rosie come across in their journey!

Click the image above to see detailed character bios on the website!

The funds from this campaign will be going toward the costs of finishing theRobot and Fox: The Amazing Journey eBook and getting it ready to release online.

These costs include the final editing and formatting of the manuscript, final touch-up and preparation of the cover and inside illustrations, and the legal costs associated with releasing the book (which includes purchasing the copyright, and ISBN numbers). The cost of all of these things would be covered by the $1500 raised and get the book ready for release.

I love the characters and world of the book, and there’s so much more I want to do with it! I’d be thrilled to raise the initial goal and release the book, but if we can raise more than that, there are more things I want to make the book even better!

If we can reach the $1500 goal, I have some other things planned for Robot and Fox and would love to do them!

My first goal beyond releasing the book would be to finish an animated trailer I’m working on to help promote and bring attention to the book. The trailer will be a 90-second, 2-D animated venture into the world ofRobot and Fox. The goal would be to give potential readers a stunning and beautiful peek at the world of the story.

Trailer Preview

I’m currently working on animating and creating the backgrounds. There’s a long way to go, but here’s a few pictures of from the trailer in progress:

Backgrounds

Roughing in and creating a series of mountain ranges to fly over.

Creating the inside of a volcano.

Roughing in a shot in the desert with a stand-in image of Roland.

Animation

Fox smiling up at Roland, waiting to be animated and colored!

Animating in Toon Boom Studio

Going from storyboard to key pose drawing.

I’m extremely excited to bring all these characters to life with animation, but my little laptop can’t handle the task. The shot featured above took a full day to render on its own. In order to finish the entire thing, I’m going to need a more powerful computer to handle the complex visuals featured in the trailer.

There are some shots in the trailer also require 3D set elements. I would like to use a tool that works with After Effects called Element 3D to incorporate these set pieces in After Effects. The software is relatively inexpensive at $150 USD.

Finishing the trailer on my own would also be a Herculean task. Much of this stretch goal would go toward getting some helping hands in the animation process with animating, inbetweening, coloring, and compositing.

With the right equipment, and the help of some friends, I would love to release the trailer side-by-side with the book at the end of July!

If the campaign reaches its initial goal of $3000 and reaches beyond that to this level, I will commission my friend Steve Blumenthal to create aRobot and Fox: The Amazing Journeysoundtrack! I’ve worked with Steve on all of my short animated films, and I know he’ll be able to make something awesome! He will create 20 songs (one for each chapter), and I will release the soundtrack as a free download on iTunes! It will befreefor anyone to download!

I would be so stoked to raise this much for the book! If the campaign goes beyond these other goals, funds raised above and beyond the $4000 mark will go toward a paperback version of the book. The process for this is expensive, and the book as it is now is not well-suited for print. Color illustrations are extremely expensive to have inside a book, so additional funds will go toward creating a new series of black-and-white pen and ink drawings for the book. Printed books also require more exact formatting and setup for print, and fund would go toward making these changes to the manuscript.

I’m hoping through a combination of the funds received from this Kickstarter campaign, and the early sales of the book, I can deliver a print version of the book in the near future!

If funding does reach this level, stay tuned for other stretch goals for other fun Robot and Fox ideas!